There’s a moment late in The Great Believers where one character says, “There was this tiny window where we were safer, and happier. I thought it was the beginning of something. When really it was the end.” That kind of unmet hope and melancholy—but dogged persistence in trying to escape it—is at the heart of Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel and its backdrop of the AIDS epidemic in 1980s Chicago.
Yale might be new in his job as development director of a small university art museum, but he feels like he’s finally finding his feet. Through Fiona, a friend’s younger sister, he is introduced to an elderly woman whose youth in 1920s Paris has left her with millions of dollars in original art from greats of the period. She wants to donate it all to the museum, and she’ll only work with Yale to do so. The only hitch is her powerful family, who don’t want such a chunk of their inheritance given away. Still, Yale is optimistic that the donation will go through.
His professional success is especially appreciated because of the tumult in his personal life, as friend after friend, including Fiona’s brother, succumbs to the AIDS epidemic. Meanwhile, thirty years later, Fiona is drowning in a different kind of personal disaster as she flies to Paris with a faint hope of finding her estranged daughter—and, perhaps, a new granddaughter. As she reconnects with old friends and makes new, the grief and anger filling her for her entire adult life flares up all over again. When she find her daughter once again, she realizes this new rift has its roots those same old painful wounds.
The writing in The Great Believers is rich and lovely, and it has to be to carry such weighty stories. Both Yale and Fiona suffer loss after loss, usually due to circumstances entirely out of their control. That doesn’t stop those losses from hurting, and that pain and trauma only compound with each new death. Fiona feels lost after losing her brother and seeing her homophobic family’s cold reaction, while Yale’s family isn’t much better. In this found family of two, they are greater than the sum of their parts.
Hope and love, however, can do little against an epidemic, and nothing can blunt the pain of losing so many friends so quickly and consistently. Its back-cover matter says The Great Believers is a story about “finding goodness in the midst of disaster.” While that might be true of Yale’s story, and Fiona during the events of that time, I found a greater theme to be about how trauma can root a person to a time and place, even as the world continues to move around them. When Fiona runs into an old friend in Paris—a friend she thought had died of AIDS long ago—she is stunned by how easily he seems to have shed the destruction that still holds her tight. “How utterly strange that [he] could have a second life,” Makkai writes, “a whole entire life, when Fiona had been living for the past thirty years in a deafening echo. She’d been tending the graveyard alone, oblivious to the fact that the world had moved on, that one of the graves had been empty this whole time.” It’s a sharp illustration of how stretched Fiona is between the past and present.
Despite the largely bleak subject matter, I found myself captivated by The Great Believers. I didn’t particularly like Fiona, nor did her Parisian adventure have me racing through Yale’s chapters to find out what happened next. Yale is a likeable guy, a good guy, almost to a fault. But the steady march of devastation around Yale, and Fiona, likewise pulled me in. Thirty-plus years removed, the events of the AIDS epidemic qualify as historical fiction, and The Great Believers is a rare and worthwhile reminder at how a generation of the LGBTQ+ community was decimated by a disease that was overwhelmingly dismissed by the powers that be. It’s also a reminder that such tragedy afflicting such a large number of young people isn’t necessarily unique, as Yale’s donor eventually reveals.
As The Great Believers shows, such a cyclical thing, such familiar tragedy, doesn’t make it any less painful to experience. But as it also shows, the struggle to find joy and move forward even within such tragedy is a thing of beauty, too.
Ring Reads 